Absenteeism can deeply affect productivity, team morale, and a company’s financial performance. Frequent employee absences disrupt workflows, place additional strain on colleagues, and may contribute to burnout and disengagement. So how can we reduce absenteeism in the workplace?
Addressing absenteeism is thus critical not only for operational efficiency but also for fostering a positive workplace culture in which employees feel valued and motivated to participate.
Below are 12 strategies designed to reduce absenteeism, supporting a more reliable and engaged workforce.
What is Absenteeism in the Workplace?
Absenteeism in the workplace normally refers to a frequent or regular absence from work by an employee.
The absence can include justified reasons for being off work, but generally, it refers to when repeated unplanned absences occur.
The reasons might be due to a number of reasons and these, for example, can include because of personal issues, unhappiness at work, job burnout, and health worries and concerns.
These unplanned and frequent absences can impact colleagues and have a negative impact on productivity, team morale, and company costs.
12 Ways to Reduce Absenteeism in the Workplace
Having defined above what absenteeism in the workplace is, we inevitably will be looking for ways to improve workplace attendance, save the cost of absenteeism, and help employees and the workplace environment.
1. Build an Inclusive Workplace
As a manager or team leader, it is essential to understand the concept of ‘Inclusive Leadership’ and what it means to build a sense of inclusion.
To make a positive atmosphere and sense of unity, you need to ensure that every member of your team:
- Feels that they are a valued member of their team
- Is given the same opportunities for promotions, work tasks, and opportunities as their colleagues
- No matter where they work from (i.e. in person or remotely) have the same access to the tools they need to do their work
- No matter what their dis/ability they have the same opportunities.
Being an inclusive leader is one of the best ways to build a workplace whereby absenteeism is reduced because colleagues want to come to work because they feel valued.
A positive workplace culture encourages employees to come to work and feel good about being there.
2. Improve the Physical Working Environment
As we discussed when looking at the causes of absenteeism, trying to provide the best possible physical working environment for our employees is also a key strategy for helping to reduce absenteeism in the workplace.
While it is not always possible to make changes to the physical working environment because of budgets, there is a lot we can often do, sometimes with things as simple as improving the plant life in the office.
Try to place employees in rooms also with a natural light source such as with a window and try to declutter rooms to provide a sense of space.
For colleagues who work online (and those in the office) you can also work to ensure that they have the right office equipment such as chairs, desks etc in terms of ergonomics. You can find 15 more ideas here on how to improve physical office space.
3. Promote Work-Life Balance
If you have the authority as a manager to do so, offering flexible working is a powerful way to improve the work-life balance and to directly influence and reduce absenteeism rates.
Two example options are:
- Flexible work hours – especially useful for parents of young children
- Remote working options – can especially help those with mobility issues
4. Recognize and Reward Attendance
This is an option that has pros and cons so I’ll leave this option up to you.
Recognition is a powerful tool in employee motivation and thus rewarding good attendance rates such as giving an extra day off every quarter for excellent attendance rates in the previous quarter, is an option.
The only thing to consider is that in addition to reducing absenteeism, you also want to avoid presenteeism (where employees attend work even when they shouldn’t i.e. when it could be the detriment of the employee or the team).
5. Improve Employee Engagement
If you’ve already read the employee experience guides, you’ll appreciate that employee engagement is a very powerful way to retain employees by giving them:
- an enjoyable place to work
- opportunities for growth such as with a career path
- a workplace where they feel motivated
Employee Engagement involves a number of topics including building better open communication, running team-building activities, and involving employees in the decision-making processes.
>> Employee Engagement Training Materials
6. Offer Wellness Classes and Workshops
Workplace stress is one of the most common reasons for workplace absenteeism, so you might want to consider offering stress management programs.
These can include the offer of wellness workshops, lunchtime meditation, and access to counselling services.
Make sure that your team are aware of exactly how to access any of the stress-related resources and help.
7. Directly Address Causes of Absenteeism
Talking directly as a manager to an employee who is absent often, to gain a better understanding of the root cause can often be extremely helpful.
There might be external issues from outside of work such as health issues, or there might be problems in the workplace and you can address these directly.
It goes without saying that sensitivity is needed in any one-on-one conversations you have with employees.
Uncovering underlying issues can often help to directly reduce absenteeism in the workplace.
8. Improve Workplace Safety
If you are looking to improve workplace attendance, have you considered the connection between safety and absence?
You might be surprised at the number of work days lost to work-related injuries. In the UK, for example, 3.68 million hours were lost for example in 2022 (Statista.com).
Workplace safety is not only a legal and moral requirement, but it has a strong impact on lost work hours.
If you have tried the other points in this list, you might wish to relook at safety in your workplace and evaluate what percentage of lost hours your business is losing, and react accordingly.
9. Support a Healthy Workload
Another option in the push to reduce absenteeism in the workplace is to avoid any of your team suffering burnout, especially given that the time an employee is off when suffering burnout can often be an extended timeframe.
Do everything you can as a manager to watch out for signs of employee burnout and work to ensure that workloads are balanced, fair, and realistic.
Check in your regular one-to-one meetings if the employee is managing well or not and be willing to make adjustments as necessary.
10. Invest in Training
We talked about employee engagement earlier and this ties in, in part, with ensuring that you provide training and development opportunities where possible for your team.
Training provides the employee with the opportunity to grow in terms of knowledge and to develop their career path, whilst also improving their job satisfaction, and keeping them engaged.
If budgets are tight, mentorship and coaching are two options worth considering.
If you have employees from different generations in your team, mentoring can be a great option to further build trust and respect within your team.
11. Encourage Open Communication
Being a leader who creates an open workplace where open communication is the norm, is something that helps improve workplace attendance.
We need employees to have a sense of psychological safety i.e. employees should feel that they safely discuss issues, challenges, and ideas, without any fear or worry of any negative consequences.
Open communication means that as a manager, you can identify problems earlier on.
12. Using up Vacation Time
It can be so easy to work and continue to try to meet deadlines and then neglect the holiday or vacation time we have accrued.
As a manager, it can be worth pushing staff to use all of their annual vacation time up, before it expires each year.
Actively promote vacation time as the impact of recharging and impact on mental health can be significant.
What is the Impact of Absenteeism in the Workplace?
The effects of absenteeism as already discussed is much more than just missed work hours. The impacts include the following:
- Decreased in Productivity: Frequent absences from work not only impact that specific employee’s workload but can impact the whole team’s, because of the disruption to workflows and deadlines.
- Increased Workload for Colleagues: Employee absences also often mean a greater workload for colleagues. This in turn can sometimes result in burnout, frustration, and reduced morale for others in the team.
- Higher Costs: Absenteeism can result in higher costs when temporary staff need to be hired, or when other staff need to be paid overtime rates.
- Decrease in Team Morale: When some employees are frequently absent, others may feel resentment or demoralization, especially if they’re covering additional tasks.
- Customer Satisfaction Impact: For customer service-related roles, absenteeism can result in an impact on responses, delays, and other effects on the customer and this of course is bad for any business.
What are the Benefits of Reducing Absenteeism Rates?
Let’s summarize what the benefits of managing to reduce absenteeism in the workplace provide us as a company or workplace manager:
Minimizing absentee rates can result in the following:
- Much greater consistency in workflows
- Less stress and strain on colleagues such as in terms of workloads.
- Great morale through consistency and a more engaged workforce.
- Cost savings due to savings on temporary staff and the need for any overtime pay.
- Better customer satisfaction through consistent service.
FAQs
What are the strategies used to prevent absenteeism?
The most effective strategies are to:
– Meet monthly with each employee to discuss their progress, workload, and any issues.
– Ensure you integrate a sense of psychological safety and inclusion into your team and workplace.
– Promote a work-life balance.
What is the preventive action of absenteeism in the workplace?
The best option to promote a positive and healthy work environment by offering wellness sessions, accessible support, flexible work options, team building, and focusing on employee engagement techniques.
How does absenteeism impact team morale?
Absenteeism can have quite a detrimental effect on team morale because colleagues often have increased workloads and deadlines can be missed due to absent staff.
Paul is Co-Founder of Symonds Research and is a qualified researcher with a PhD in wayfinding. Paul helps the team at Symonds Research build and focus on providing high-quality training materials packages and programs for trainers, classroom teachers and HR departments.